T-Mobile Wearables Plan Throttled to 512kbps

Aside from all the obvious hullabaloo surrounding the new Apple iPhone X earlier this week, one of the other big announcements at the event in Cupertino was the unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 3. It looks mostly the same, but now itâ€™s available with its own cellular chip. This means you can send texts and stream music without being tethered to an iPhone. Thatâ€™s cool in an Inspector Gadget kind of way, even if itâ€™s not the first smartphone to boast this capability.

Because Apple is very rarely ever the â€śfirstâ€ť to do anything, but thatâ€™s another discussion for another day.

To help facilitate folks who may be interested in making calls from their new Apple Watch Series 3, thereâ€™s a new T-Mobile wearables plan for just $10/month. That sounds like a pretty good deal, because it means you can justifiably leave your iPhone at home when you go for a run around the block or for a quick jaunt to the grocery store, especially since you can use the Apple Watch for Apple Pay too. Thatâ€™s all well and good, except for one glaring problem.

That new T-Mobile wearables plan is permanently throttled to just 512Kbps. Remember that the new Apple Watch only has an LTE radio; it doesnâ€™t rock any older 2G or 3G technology under the hood. What this means is that while the Apple Watch is fully capable (and even designed for) 4G LTE speeds, youâ€™ll be stuck at 0.5Mbps.

Those kinds of speeds might not be so bad if all youâ€™re doing is checking your email or firing off a snarky tweet, but it could get really burdensome if you want to stream some of that new Taylor Swift jam while angrily burning calories on an elliptical at the gym. It also means that Siri is going to be much slower.

This isnâ€™t to say that you canâ€™t get access to faster speeds with T-Mobile on your Apple Watch. It just means you need to upgrade it to a more expensive planâ€¦ but it does mean that this $10 T-Mobile wearables plan might not be quite enough for people who would have considered it.